Should You Get The Flu Vaccine?

It’s that time of year again. Everyone seems to be advertising the flu vaccine. Your doctor, your local hospital, walk-in clinics, and even the local pharmacy all have the flu vaccine ready and waiting for you to get vaccinated. But, should you get it? I’m not going to tell either way. What I will do is supply you with the evidence from a number of comprehensive reviews on the scientific and medical literature done on the flu vaccine. This way you can make an informed decision on your own on whether or not to get the flu shot.

As a clinical pharmacist, I’m just as interested as you are on whether or not the flu shot is worth getting. For this reason, I did what any respective healthcare professional would do. I turned to the Cochrane Collaboration for answers.

The Cochrane Collaboration is a non-profit, international network of over 28,000 individuals from over 100 countries. These individuals work to provide unbiased, evidence-based reviews from available scientific and medical research studies to help healthcare providers, policy-makers, patients and their advocates make informed decisions regarding their health care. These reviews are called the Cochrane Reviews. These reviews are highly trusted and credible because they are free of commercial bias. The Cochrane Collaboration doesn’t allow big money or special interest groups to taint their organization or their highly respected work. This is made evident in their commercial sponsorship policy:

“The Cochrane Collaboration has gained an international reputation for producing evidence of the highest standard to inform healthcare decision-making. To maintain this reputation, we are committed to ensuring that the results of Cochrane Reviews are not influenced by personal or commercial interests, particularly from the pharmaceutical industry and medical device manufacturers. Sponsorship of Cochrane Reviews, their derivative products, author teams and the Cochrane ‘entities’ who produce them, by any commercial source, is strictly prohibited.“

This doesn’t mean that the Cochrane Collaboration avoids reviewing studies that are funded by drug companies or medical device companies. It only means they, as an organization, provide unbiased reviews based on ALL the available data whether or not it was industry funded, government funded, or privately funded. They do an excellent job in reporting whether or not studies reviewed by their organization were funded (and ultimately biased) by industry or not.

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